ApolloHoax.net
Off Topic => General Discussion => Topic started by: smartcooky on June 28, 2015, 09:41:52 PM
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http://www.3news.co.nz/world/spacex-rocket-explodes-after-launch-2015062905
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I'm probably wrong, but it looked to me like it failed at the nose and flew into itself.
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It sure looked that way in the video.
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"There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank," the occurred about 20 seconds before main engine cutoff.
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What I've heard discussed is that the payload came loose and at 3G smashed through the propellant tank in this upper stage.
Not sure how informed that was. Apparently, Musk is saying their still going over the data with a hex editor.
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The one fact we've got so far is that there was an "overpressure event" in the second stage liquid oxygen tank while the first stage was still operating. I can't recall a previous launch with a structural failure upwards of the operating stage since the first Atlas-Centaur test in 1962.
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The one fact we've got so far is that there was an "overpressure event" in the second stage liquid oxygen tank while the first stage was still operating. I can't recall a previous launch with a structural failure upwards of the operating stage since the first Atlas-Centaur test in 1962.
Maybe it over-pressurised when the payload came crashing through it? :P
A different field completely, but in motorcycle racing the post-engine grenading event is typically followed by a press-release that ALWAYS says the problem was electrical. Which usually provokes some wag to quip that the source of the electrical problems were the sparkplugs getting smashed by the piston and con-rod on their way out of the engine. ;D
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Isn't this the third one to blow up on launch? Obviously, this is proof that Apollo was fake, because no Saturn V's ever blew up...
On that topic - I know that several of the Apollo launches suffered near-catastrophic failures on launch. How many of them would have been actually catastrophic if there had been no crew aboard to fix the problem. Does anyone know?
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Also the quality of the footage of the Saturn launches was terrible compared to the footage of yesterday's launch.
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On that topic - I know that several of the Apollo launches suffered near-catastrophic failures on launch. How many of them would have been actually catastrophic if there had been no crew aboard to fix the problem. Does anyone know?
Good question. The only one that I can think of (off the top of my head) was Apollo 12- the famous "SCE to Aux" incident. Even that would probably have made it to orbit (assuming the Flight Director didn't call an abort) as the Instrument Unit ring wasn't compromised by the lightening strike.
Things happen too fast (generally) on a booster for human beings to be able to react in time. The IU was one of the real unsung heroes of the program.
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On that topic - I know that several of the Apollo launches suffered near-catastrophic failures on launch. How many of them would have been actually catastrophic if there had been no crew aboard to fix the problem. Does anyone know?
Good question. The only one that I can think of (off the top of my head) was Apollo 12- the famous "SCE to Aux" incident. Even that would probably have made it to orbit (assuming the Flight Director didn't call an abort) as the Instrument Unit ring wasn't compromised by the lightening strike.
Things happen too fast (generally) on a booster for human beings to be able to react in time. The IU was one of the real unsung heroes of the program.
Apollo 13 had an engine failure during launch (the centre one?) but that wasn't really a problem unless one of the others failed too. They still went into orbit.
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Yes, on the second stage.
And Apollo 10 had a problem in lunar orbit, where the control of the LM was lost. And just recovered in time.
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Yes, on the second stage.
Which brings up a question for me.
AIUI, after the TLI burn, the third stage and everything forward of it is heading for the moon on a free return trajectory. Shortly after leaving the earth the crew translates the CSM and extracts the LEM from the LEM Adaptor, and when the CSM+LM nears the moon, they execute a LOI burn to go into orbit.
What happened to the third stage with the instrument ring and the loose panels of the LEM Adaptor? Were they still on a free return back to earth or do they crash into the moon
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Which brings up a question for me.
AIUI, after the TLI burn, the third stage and everything forward of it is heading for the moon on a free return trajectory. Shortly after leaving the earth the crew translates the CSM and extracts the LEM from the LEM Adaptor, and when the CSM+LM nears the moon, they execute a LOI burn to go into orbit.
What happened to the third stage with the instrument ring and the loose panels of the LEM Adaptor? Were they still on a free return back to earth or do they crash into the moon
AFAIK unspent fuel and oxidiser were vented to change trajectory to solar orbit. From Apollo 13 onward S-IVBs were directed to hit Moon to give ALSEP seismometers something to measure. I have no idea about SLA panels but if they were on free return trajectory I'd guess they reentered and burned in atmosphere.
Lurky
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AFAIK unspent fuel and oxidiser were vented to change trajectory to solar orbit. From Apollo 13 onward S-IVBs were directed to hit Moon to give ALSEP seismometers something to measure. I have no idea about SLA panels but if they were on free return trajectory I'd guess they reentered and burned in atmosphere.
Lurky
J0023 was the designation given to an unknown object discovered by an amaetur over a decade ago. That's now thought to be the S-IVB off Apollo 12
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J002E3
They did think that another object, GP59, was one of the A13 panels, but this has now been IIRC disproved.
http://www.universetoday.com/85116/is-winking-near-earth-asteroid-gp59-really-the-missing-apollo-13-panel/
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Lots of talk against the notion that something in the spacecraft came loose, specifically the docking adapter. That would probably have registered somewhere. Discussion now seems to be on the tank itself.
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What happened to the third stage with the instrument ring and the loose panels of the LEM Adaptor?
Depends on the mission. For Apollos 8, 10, 11 and 12, the excess LOX on the S-IVB was vented in a forward direction to slow the stage down. This allowed the moon to cross its path before it got there, so it swung around the trailing "edge" of the moon. The moon dragged it along in its orbit, acting as a slingshot to eject it into an earth escape trajectory so that they went into independent orbits around the sun -- where they remain today.
Starting with Apollo 13, the LOX dump events were tuned so that the stages would hit the moon. Not only did this get rid of some space junk (though space junk in solar orbit isn't much of a problem) but it created some nice, well-calibrated seismic signals for the seismometers left on the moon. This helped probe the moon's interior structure.
As Zakalwe points out, Apollo 12's S-IVB was a special case. It was intended to slingshot into solar orbit, but it didn't approach the moon closely enough and remained in a very high earth orbit for a while before perturbations finally ejected it into solar orbit. In the early 2000s, it was temporarily recaptured into a high earth orbit where it was briefly mistaken for a natural asteroid. It then left earth orbit again a few years later.
Northern Lurker is right that what happened to the SLA panels depends on the injection trajectory. For the early missions that used the free-return trajectory, they almost certainly looped around the moon, returned to earth and hit the atmosphere. I'm not sure about the later missions, but they're likely in solar orbit.
One of the more persistent legends among UFO enthusiasts (another fairly crazy group) is that the Apollo 11 crew saw a UFO on their way to the moon. From the discussions with the ground it's quite obvious that they merely saw one of their SLA panels.
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Lots of talk against the notion that something in the spacecraft came loose, specifically the docking adapter. That would probably have registered somewhere. Discussion now seems to be on the tank itself.
The CT side claim it was shot down by a UFO. :D Apparently what is obviously, (to me anyway) a piece of the disintegrating rocket falling away, is actually a UFO leaving the scene after shooting down the rocket.
Words fail me.. :)
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You ask questions here, and you learn things that you didn't know.
That's why this forum rocks!
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Which brings up a question for me.
AIUI, after the TLI burn, the third stage and everything forward of it is heading for the moon on a free return trajectory. Shortly after leaving the earth the crew translates the CSM and extracts the LEM from the LEM Adaptor, and when the CSM+LM nears the moon, they execute a LOI burn to go into orbit.
What happened to the third stage with the instrument ring and the loose panels of the LEM Adaptor? Were they still on a free return back to earth or do they crash into the moon
AFAIK unspent fuel and oxidiser were vented to change trajectory to solar orbit. From Apollo 13 onward S-IVBs were directed to hit Moon to give ALSEP seismometers something to measure. I have no idea about SLA panels but if they were on free return trajectory I'd guess they reentered and burned in atmosphere.
Lurky
IIRC, the crew of A11 saw what turned out to be one of the SLA panels during the Earth-Moon coast.
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The general consensus in the industry is that in the Falcon 9 epoch, SpaceX has led a charmed life. Which is to say, given what we know about the design climate there, this sort of accident was bound to happen. This is not to say SpaceX is incompetent. It's to say that SpaceX makes similar design-performance-cost trade-offs as other companies, and those tend to manifest themselves abruptly and unpleasantly. It was simply SpaceX's turn. Musk is all about pushing the envelope regarding new capabilities. This is not generally compatible with reliable, low-cost access to space.
The Falcon 1 was, according to inside industry judgment, and unmitigated failure. It accidentally succeeded once, and Musk was entirely justified in ash-canning it. We had all hoped Falcon 9 would be the redemption. It still may well be, but every rocket lineage has its share of failure. Had the Saturn V flown more, it would likely have endured a similar blemish.
Earlier, in a different thread, I remarked that SpaceX would have to prove itself through performance. Until then, it may have a lot of popular support but not as much credibility in the industry. How SpaceX responds to this incident will tell the world a lot about its staying power in the field of commercial space launch service.
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You ask questions here, and you learn things that you didn't know.
That's why this forum rocks!
Absolutely, several posts here make compelling reading are are most interesting to those that work outside the industry.
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Also the quality of the footage of the Saturn launches was terrible compared to the footage of yesterday's launch.
True but it has been 45 years of technological advances in imagery that probably helped the current video.
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Had the Saturn V flown more, it would likely have endured a similar blemish.
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I was re-reading this thread and remembered I knew a female shuttle astronaut about 12 years ago, don't ask because I don't remember her name. In was after Columbia broke apart and she was schedule on maybe the 2nd mission after re-starting. She told me that statistically 1 in every 100 slights ends in some sort of failure. Is that ratio still valid after all the launches we've had in the last 12 years?
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The success rate for launch vehicles is in the range 90-98%, depending on the organisation doing it. The Russians and the US start-ups are at the low end, Arianespace, ULA and the Chinese at the upper end.
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From our discussion she was referring to all flights and not characterizing a specific country. But the figure of 90-98% agrees with her assertion.
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Hearing return to flight may be within a couple of months?
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Hearing return to flight may be within a couple of months?
Where did you hear that?
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Hearing return to flight may be within a couple of months?
Where did you hear that?
http://www.spaceflightinsider.com/organizations/space-exploration-technologies/spacex-hopes-to-return-falcon-9-to-service-with-orbcomm-mission/
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Thanks and here's hoping that it is a successful flight and landing on the barge
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For Apollos 8, 10, 11 and 12, the excess LOX on the S-IVB was vented in a forward direction to slow the stage down. This allowed the moon to cross its path before it got there, so it swung around the trailing "edge" of the moon. The moon dragged it along in its orbit, acting as a slingshot to eject it into an earth escape trajectory so that they went into independent orbits around the sun -- where they remain today.
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For the early missions that used the free-return trajectory, they almost certainly looped around the moon, returned to earth and hit the atmosphere. I'm not sure about the later missions, but they're likely in solar orbit.
I don't mean to derail the thread, but there has to be a way to calculate exactly where these things are today, isn't there?
I mean, if the velocities, attitude, inclination, and locations of all of the spacecraft were known when the stagings occurred, (and at the time, they had to be, didn't they?) then someone who knows what they're doing should be able to calculate the physical location in orbit of these pieces of hardware.
If JPL could calculate where Pluto was going to be 9 years before the launch of New Horizons, and only miss it by 7 seconds, and its 3.8 billion miles away, then the positions of the Apollo stages ought to be able to be calculated.
It would be nice if something like this were in Stellarium or something. I don't know if my 'scope could resolve something that small, and I don't think it could, but it would be pretty cool to know where to look.
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For Apollos 8, 10, 11 and 12, the excess LOX on the S-IVB was vented in a forward direction to slow the stage down. This allowed the moon to cross its path before it got there, so it swung around the trailing "edge" of the moon. The moon dragged it along in its orbit, acting as a slingshot to eject it into an earth escape trajectory so that they went into independent orbits around the sun -- where they remain today.
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For the early missions that used the free-return trajectory, they almost certainly looped around the moon, returned to earth and hit the atmosphere. I'm not sure about the later missions, but they're likely in solar orbit.
I don't mean to derail the thread, but there has to be a way to calculate exactly where these things are today, isn't there?
I mean, if the velocities, attitude, inclination, and locations of all of the spacecraft were known when the stagings occurred, (and at the time, they had to be, didn't they?) then someone who knows what they're doing should be able to calculate the physical location in orbit of these pieces of hardware.
If JPL could calculate where Pluto was going to be 9 years before the launch of New Horizons, and only miss it by 7 seconds, and its 3.8 billion miles away, then the positions of the Apollo stages ought to be able to be calculated.
It would be nice if something like this were in Stellarium or something. I don't know if my 'scope could resolve something that small, and I don't think it could, but it would be pretty cool to know where to look.
Most of the later missions impacted the lunar surface to give the scientists a seismic event to collate.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo_impact.html
EDIT2add impact site link.
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For Apollos 8, 10, 11 and 12, the excess LOX on the S-IVB was vented in a forward direction to slow the stage down. This allowed the moon to cross its path before it got there, so it swung around the trailing "edge" of the moon. The moon dragged it along in its orbit, acting as a slingshot to eject it into an earth escape trajectory so that they went into independent orbits around the sun -- where they remain today.
...
For the early missions that used the free-return trajectory, they almost certainly looped around the moon, returned to earth and hit the atmosphere. I'm not sure about the later missions, but they're likely in solar orbit.
I don't mean to derail the thread, but there has to be a way to calculate exactly where these things are today, isn't there?
I mean, if the velocities, attitude, inclination, and locations of all of the spacecraft were known when the stagings occurred, (and at the time, they had to be, didn't they?) then someone who knows what they're doing should be able to calculate the physical location in orbit of these pieces of hardware.
If JPL could calculate where Pluto was going to be 9 years before the launch of New Horizons, and only miss it by 7 seconds, and its 3.8 billion miles away, then the positions of the Apollo stages ought to be able to be calculated.
It would be nice if something like this were in Stellarium or something. I don't know if my 'scope could resolve something that small, and I don't think it could, but it would be pretty cool to know where to look.
Problem is, the "play" in the accuracy of the vectors add up over time, so at present day, only approximations are possible. 40+ years of free travel leads to big error margins.
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For Apollos 8, 10, 11 and 12, the excess LOX on the S-IVB was vented in a forward direction to slow the stage down. This allowed the moon to cross its path before it got there, so it swung around the trailing "edge" of the moon. The moon dragged it along in its orbit, acting as a slingshot to eject it into an earth escape trajectory so that they went into independent orbits around the sun -- where they remain today.
...
For the early missions that used the free-return trajectory, they almost certainly looped around the moon, returned to earth and hit the atmosphere. I'm not sure about the later missions, but they're likely in solar orbit.
I don't mean to derail the thread, but there has to be a way to calculate exactly where these things are today, isn't there?
I mean, if the velocities, attitude, inclination, and locations of all of the spacecraft were known when the stagings occurred, (and at the time, they had to be, didn't they?) then someone who knows what they're doing should be able to calculate the physical location in orbit of these pieces of hardware.
If JPL could calculate where Pluto was going to be 9 years before the launch of New Horizons, and only miss it by 7 seconds, and its 3.8 billion miles away, then the positions of the Apollo stages ought to be able to be calculated.
It would be nice if something like this were in Stellarium or something. I don't know if my 'scope could resolve something that small, and I don't think it could, but it would be pretty cool to know where to look.
My guess is that one confounding factor would be the gravity field of the Moon. We know it's lumpy, but how well can it be modelled to determine how it would affect the S-IVBs as they slide by? And the old chaos theory - it only takes a small change in the initial conditions to lead to a very different outcome 40+ years later.
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That's right -- these trajectories are highly "chaotic" in the formal sense that small uncertainties in initial conditions lead to big uncertainties in state (position, velocity) over time.
There are quite a few pieces of Apollo hardware in solar orbit. The ones I can think of:
Apollo 8 S-IVB
Apollo 9 S-IVB (relit in earth orbit into escape)
Apollo 10 S-IVB
Apollo 10 LM (Snoopy) ascent stage
Apollo 11 S-IVB
Apollo 12 S-IVB (made a temporary return to earth orbit in the early 2000's)
Beginning with Apollo 13, the S-IVBs impacted the moon.
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Reminds me of the "Mythbusters" episode, where they tried to walk in a straight line - blindfolded.
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Well, dang... I was looking for a reason to pull that 10" Dobsonian monstrosity out of the garage.
Oh well... I guess there could be something interesting to look at, planetary-wise.
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Well, dang... I was looking for a reason to pull that 10" Dobsonian monstrosity out of the garage.
While the Apollo 12 S-IVB was temporarily caught in Earth orbit a decade ago, it was only 16th magnitude. Pluto is typically a couple of magnitudes brighter. Can you see it?
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Well, dang... I was looking for a reason to pull that 10" Dobsonian monstrosity out of the garage.
While the Apollo 12 S-IVB was temporarily caught in Earth orbit a decade ago, it was only 16th magnitude. Pluto is typically a couple of magnitudes brighter. Can you see it?
I honestly don't know, but probably not.
Let me expand on that by saying that I hoped I was looking at Pluto, but to be perfectly honest, I couldn't say with even 50% certainty that I was. I had to take someone else's word for it. ::) I went to a star party several years ago that was put on by a college in a neighboring state. I took my Dob, but it was by far the smallest scope there. Ended up looking through some guy's 18" Obsession. He said it was Pluto, but all I saw was a fuzzy pinprick of light. I probably couldn't resolve an S-IVB with my 10" even if it was in lunar orbit. I didn't even think of it that way. In fact, I should have known better. The thing is only about 60 feet long.
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I think the only way you could really definitively confirm either object is to take a time exposure, then confirm both the position and just as importantly the proper motion of the object as what they should be.
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I think the only way you could really definitively confirm either object is to take a time exposure, then confirm both the position and just as importantly the proper motion of the object as what they should be.
Can't take photos with a Dob.
At least, not easily, and not with mine. The eyepiece-to-camera interface throws off the focus, and there's no way to manually track with the type of mount I have with enough accuracy to follow anything. Oh, they have those "Barn Door" type equatorial platforms, but I'm not mechanically-inclined enough or patient enough to try to build one.